TO AGORI TROI TO FAGITO TOU POULIOU

Director's Statement

I didn’t think politics would be at the forefront of this film but of course I was being naive: one guy fighting against a hostile world and against his own world view — that’s a political film. And while I did not start out to make a political film, it certainly is not just a personal story. The film may stand as an allegory in the way that most of the people here in Greece can’t see themselves reflected in each other; they cannot assess their value. Entire generations of Greeks in their 20s, 30s and 40s have now been told they are not useful, that their existence and role has no meaning. In the film, the story revolves around our character’s first full realisation that something is wrong … that he is just not useful within this society. With this, my first film, I wanted to express my reaction against the Greek situation today, though in a non‐directly political way. I accidentally read “Hunger”, the novel by Knut Hamsun, and from that came the inception of an idea … the beginning of a story about a young artist who has nothing but what he can create in his mind. It was the pretext of a story.